Mexican Drug Cartels Targeting Rights Activists

Hitmen are killing human rights workers across Mexico’s most violent drug war city in brazen attacks that activists say authorities are unable and unwilling to halt.

Gunmen in Ciudad Juarez have set fire to activists’ homes, murdered disabled family members and even targeted their children, provoking an exodus of the few people willing to denounce relentless violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“This is an emergency,” said local rights leader Emilia Gonzalez, who has been documenting abuses in the area. “There are a lot of activists, including some women, whose lives are in serious danger.”

Ciudad Juarez has become a dark emblem of Mexico’s drug war, with some 8,000 killings in and around the city over the past three years. Now one of the world’s deadliest places and gripped by lawlessness, gangs are fighting over smuggling routes into the United States, the city’s drug addicts, and lucrative extortion and kidnapping rackets.

Rights workers have accused authorities of corruption and rounding up drug addicts as scapegoats.

Assailants have killed at least eight prominent activists across Chihuahua state, which includes Ciudad Juarez, since early 2008, when drug violence began to escalate in the region.

Intimidation intensified last month when gunmen renewed attacks on activist Marisela Reyes and her family. The Reyes family has been decimated since it began campaigning for justice for victims of the violence and drawing attention to the government’s failure to combat the anarchy that is engulfing Ciudad Juarez.

President Felipe Calderon has pledged to end the violence in Ciudad Juarez and made a string of visits to the city, but the government appears unable to protect rights workers. That has led to accusations the army, police and authorities -violence in the city are turning a blind eye to attacks.

The L.A.-based comedian and talk show host is bringing her activism north of the border...

Comments

2 Comments

Ozlanthos on
March 10, 2011 6:21 am

When are people going to understand. The drug war is a conditioning exercise. It is meant to condition you to the idea that you are a slave to the state, and that the only right you do have is to exist as such. Liberty, fairness, justice, these concepts are all figments of your imagination. All that had to happen in order for this conditioning to take hold was a few very public assassinations, and people shut up about their “rights”. Your vote doesn’t mean anything, if the state wants to do something, it will do that thing. Nothing you say or do will ever change that.

If the state wants to harass, intimidate, brutalize, incarcerate, and/or kill you, it will. People fantasize that the aberrations in our justice system, and the activities of criminal organizations are separate, but they aren’t. The only difference is their level of officiousness. Officially, the federal government is against the sale and use of mind-altering substances. Unofficially, the CIA, DEA, and various federal and local policing agencies import drugs into the market. If you are so inclined you can find plenty of proof of this fact. Just look up Freeway Ricky Ross (American Drug War: Americas Last Great White Hope). Then go back and watch New Jack City again… It will make a lot more sense.

The only way any of this will ever change is if we elect people of integrity who officially state that ending the war on drugs, and establishing an official regulatory body to over-see the market is a major part of their strategy. Otherwise we will get more of the same, no matter the color of their skin, their national/cultural heritage, their political party, or which set of genitalia they possess.

-Oz

malcolm kyle on
March 9, 2011 5:04 pm

Prohibition is a sickening horror and the ocean of hypocrisy, incompetence, corruption and human wreckage it has left in its wake is almost endless.

Prohibition has decimated generations and criminalized millions for a behavior which is entwined in human existence, and for what other purpose than to uphold the defunct and corrupt thinking of a minority of misguided, self-righteous Neo-Puritans and degenerate demagogues who wish nothing but unadulterated destruction on the rest of us.

Based on the unalterable proviso that drug use, among all echelons of society, is essentially an unstoppable and ongoing human behavior which has been with us since the dawn of time, any serious reading on the subject of past attempts at any form of drug prohibition would point most normal thinking people in the direction of sensible regulation.

By its very nature, prohibition cannot fail but create a vast increase in criminal activity, and rather than preventing society from descending into anarchy, it actually fosters an anarchic business model – the international Drug Trade. Any decisions concerning quality, quantity, distribution and availability are then left in the hands of unregulated, anonymous and ruthless drug dealers, who are interested only in the huge profits involved. Thus the allure of this reliable and lucrative industry, with it’s enormous income potential that consistently outweighs the risks associated with the illegal operations that such a trade entails, will remain with us until we are collectively forced to admit the obvious.

There is therefore an irrefutable connection between drug prohibition and the crime, corruption, disease and death it causes. Anybody ‘halfway bright’, and who’s not psychologically challenged, should be capable of understanding that it is not simply the demand for drugs that creates the mayhem, it is our refusal to allow legal businesses to meet that demand. If you are not capable of understanding this connection then maybe you’re using something far stronger than the rest of us. So put away your pipe, lock yourself away in a small room with some tinned soup and water, and try to crawl back into reality A.S.A.P.

Because Drug cartels will always have an endless supply of ready cash for wages, bribery and equipment, no amount of tax money, police powers, weaponry, wishful thinking or pseudo-science will make our streets safe again. Only an end to prohibition can do that! How much longer are you willing to foolishly risk your own survival by continuing to ignore the obvious, historically confirmed solution?

If you support the Kool-Aid mass suicide cult of prohibition, and erroneously believe that you can win a war without logic and practical solutions, then prepare yourself for even more death, tortured corpses, corruption, terrorism, sickness, imprisonment, economic tribulation, unemployment and the complete loss of the rule of law.

“A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
Abraham Lincoln

The only thing prohibition successfully does is prohibit regulation & taxation while turning even our schools and prisons into black markets for drugs. Regulation would mean the opposite!

Prohibition is nothing less than a grotesque dystopian nightmare; if you support it you must be either ignorant, stupid, brainwashed, insane or corrupt.